RIP Hilton Kramer, the man who kept the American mind open

Kramer, the founding editor of the New Criterion, who died at the end of March, aged 84, wasn't an internationally famous figure, nor does the New Criterion, the New York arts magazine, have a large circulation. But both punch – or, in Kramer's case, punched – much higher than their weight.

The New Criterion has only been going 30 years but, more than any other newspaper and magazine, it has raged against the collapse of artistic and literary standards. What Kramer cottoned on to, very early on, was how anti-establishment art and letters have become the establishment over the last half-century or so. It was fine to be revolutionary as long as there was a body of high-minded literature and skilled, beautiful art to react against. But, once the revolution became the norm, gone was that central core of high-mindedness and skill.

It is one of the paradoxes of America that it leads the way in the banal academic and artistic schools that attack genuine talent and thought; and yet, at the same time, it guards the academic and artistic canon with a high seriousness that we cannot match over here. The New Criterion – and Hilton Kramer – were, and are, bastions of that seriousness.